


lest your fancy (may think anon it moves)

by Welcoming_Disaster



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 1872, Marvel Secret Wars Battleworlds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, M/M, Mentions of animal/livestock deaths, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28115742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welcoming_Disaster/pseuds/Welcoming_Disaster
Summary: Marvel 1872: Tony kills the pigs.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 9
Kudos: 15
Collections: Stony's Sad Secret Santa 2020





	lest your fancy (may think anon it moves)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deervsheadlights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deervsheadlights/gifts).



> i hope you like this, deer! written for the prompt:  
> "I love when fics explore the repercussions of a traumatic situation. Whether that be emotional, psychological, physical trauma or all three is up to you" and the 1872 suggested fandom. 
> 
> title is taken from the winter's tale because i'm rapidly becoming that bitch 
> 
> Please see endnote for detailed trigger warnings (mostly described in the tags).

Tony kills the pigs. 

His hand is sweaty on the gun he has taken back from hands smaller, more delicate than his. His aim is awful. It doesn’t hit him until too late that he could have hit the body, could have hit Steve. 

Fisk turns to stare at him, the overwhelming bulk of his shoulders blocking the setting sun, displeasure written into the every line of his bald, egg-like head. Tony’s vision blurs. A woman’s hand is on his elbow, pulling him back. 

“Now,” Fisk says. The top of his bald head is going ruddy red with anger, but his voice remains calm, calculated. “What did you do that for, Mr. Stark?” 

Tony’s flustered. Tony’s off guard, Tony’s off his rocker, words are coming too slow, at first, and then too quick, in one sudden burst, “It’snotright—“ 

“Stark,” one of the women mutters, in warning. It fades into the background noise behind him. He wishes he was sober. He wants a drink. He wishes he was dead, in the pig pen, in Steve’s place. He knows he needs to stay alive right now. 

Fisk glances down into the pig pen. His pinstripe pants, fat black stripes on the white fabric, are stained with blood. The pigs, Tony thinks. He would have taken care not to get his suit dirty when he’d thrown the b— when he had thrown Steve. 

“That man,” he says, his voice level and low in a way that allows no space for argument. “Is dead. Make sure he gets a proper burial. And you’ll pay, Stark.” 

At another tug on the gun, Tony relinquishes his grip. He’s nauseous, breathing heavily. It hasn’t hit him yet. None of it has hit, yet. “I—“ 

“For the pigs,” Fisk gives him a slow smile, predatory, “you’ll have the money to pay the owner, I’m sure.” 

Tony stares at him, trying to breathe. There’s not enough space in his lungs for all the air he wants to pull in and yet his chest is a hollowed out, empty thing, fragile, perhaps, on the verge of collapse. It would be all too easy, now, to let inertia and self pity carry him back to the saloon, to hope that Dr. Banner gets a look, somehow, at Steve, to come to the funeral telling himself that he’d done all he could, that he had done right by Steve. 

He’s spent the past ten years wallowing in self-indulgent misery, waking up every day to dwell on the blood splattered onto his hands by the shots of his perfect machines. What would it be, to add one life to the list?

He spits onto the ground, splattering mucus and bile on Fisk’s shoes, and forces all remnants of his drunken mumble away, forces his voice into an unfamiliar clarity. 

“I’ll pay for the pigs.” He repeats. “I’ll arrange the funeral.” 

Again, Fisk’s displeasure shows. Staring into the bloody mess in the pigsty, Tony doesn’t hear exactly what he’s barking to his men. There are only two outcomes; Fisk accepts his terms or he doesn’t. Tony knows that he doesn’t have a fighting chance, not now, if he loses this battle of wills. 

“I will be in church tomorrow,” Fisk tells him, bending down so close that his warm, moist breath ghosts over Tony’s face, “to attend the Sheriff’s funeral. Do you understand me?” 

“Yes, sir.” Tony’s hands shake. The mumble is back. 

The mayor turns his back to him. The gunmen he had brought with him flank him on every side as he strides down the street. Tony wonders how closely he’s going to be watched. 

As he looks back at the pile of animal bodies, at the blood pooling in the dusty ground in the pigsty, he realizes that any one of the pigs could have fallen on Steve. The image flashes behind his eyes before he can stop it — the crack, drowned out by gunshots, of ribs, skin pulled taut, ripping when it can no longer take the strain, the awful collapse. 

The smell of blood and dust hangs heavy in the air. Tony braces himself on the wooden post-fence of the pigsty and throws up bile. He hasn’t eaten. 

Behind him, people have started moving. The inhabitants of the town, frozen in fear as they had been, are slowly making sense of the scene in front of them. Talk erupts, dies down, and erupts again. It’s Dr. Banner who first joins him by the pigsty, his anxious face drained of all color, his long fingers fidgety. 

“Stark,” he says, “did you see—“ 

“I didn’t,” Tony’s voice comes out too loud, too abrupt, “I didn’t look, I couldn’t—“ 

Banner hops the fence and steps around the prone body of one of the pigs, bending down to look. From behind, Tony can see nothing but the tense set of his skinny shoulders. 

Much less gracefully, Tony trips forward and across the fence, the spur of his right boot catching on his left pant leg, and falls knees-first onto the massive carcass of one of the boars, “Do you see him?” 

“Yes.” Banner’s response is short, terse. 

Tony feels his heart skip a beat. “Doc, how bad—“ 

“I don’t know.” 

Tony has seen hundreds of corpses, of course, during the war. Young men, much younger than Steve. Boys. He’s seen bodies littered on battlefields like crabapples under a tree in autumn, spilling out on top of each other, squashed and rotting, the sight so jarring, so vast, he couldn’t begin to comprehend the scope of it. He’s forced himself to look each of them in the face, into their dead eyes, forced himself to take in the expressions — shock, confusion, pain— that would forever stay frozen in their faces. 

But he still can’t look. 

He doesn’t look. He doesn’t move. The skin of the dead, still-warm animal underneath him is covered in coarse hair, grainy under his fingers. They aren’t dirty at all, he reflects distantly. They aren’t dirty at all. 

“I’m not going to be able to lift him out by myself,” Banner says anxiously. Tony wonders if that means that one of the pigs had, indeed, fallen on top of Steve, if it’s all over. But Bruce is slight, shorter than Steve and built like a flagpole. He probably wouldn’t be able to handle the sheriff’s bulk under the best of circumstances. 

Just behind him, Tony hears shuffling, cloth against wood. Carol Danvers is climbing over the little fence. She’s tied up her skirts to her belt in one messy knot. Her muslin drawers, frilled at the knees, show. To Tony, they strike a strange note, oddly feminine, sensual, as out of place in this scene as anything could be. 

“What’re ya staring at, old chap?” She asks him, curt but tinged with kindness somehow, with an understanding. He wonders, not for the first time, who she had been before she’d come to this town. 

Nimbly, she steps around him and around the hogs, bending down by Banner. 

“Ms. Danvers,” he starts, over-formal in his uncertainty, but she’s already heaving Steve up by the shoulders, which leaves Dr. Banner to take him by the legs. The setting sun shines red from behind them, casting their long shadows over the broken bodies of the hog, some strange four legged creature crab-walking delicately out of the pigs’ pen.

“We oughtta have a stretcher fer this,” Banner mumbles. 

Tony feels shame pool in his gut. He should be helping, and instead he’s just let a sweet gal like Carol shoulder the weight. 

Pushing himself to his feet, he clears the fence and gives chase, his hand landing on Carol’s shoulder. The calluses on his fingers catch on her tightly woven calico shawl. 

“Give me— let me take—“ 

“We have him, Tony,” she cuts him off, not unkindly. 

“To mine, at least,” he pleads, “God, is he breathing?” 

Neither of them answer him. In semi-darkness, with Steve as motionless as he is, he doesn’t know if they can tell. 

It’s close. It’s right next door. He fumbles open the front door, and he’s already lighting his oil lamps when Dr. Banner calls for lights. 

His hand shakes and the light shakes with it, frightfully small the cavernous smithery. They’ve got the body — Steve — on his workshop table. Dr. Banner slices off his vest and shirt, business like, his dull blade ripping through the fabric as much as slicing it. The smell of blood and gunpowder hangs in the air, mixing with the normal scents of alcohol and oil. 

Steve’s face is clammy, ghostly white in the flickering light, his eyes closed as though sleeping. His eyelashes are pale, blond, and it’s oddly intimate, being close enough to count them. Tony has seen Steve asleep before, more than once, and yet he’s never looked at him like this, never stopped to count. Right now, he feels like he’s drinking Steve in, memorizing every line of his face, committing him to memory. He feels closer to Steve than he had on any of the occasions when they’d fucked, except, maybe— 

Tony’s eyes catch on the mess on his chest. 

He can’t look away. The wound is deep, bore-like, the kind of hole that should never exist in human flesh. A faint trickle of blood is still leaking out of it. Tony can see little ripped pieces of red inside, tatters, and the glimmer of a rib, but it’s too deep to see where the bullet had ended up. 

“Bring the light closer,” Banner asks. Tony moves slow, feeling four degrees of separated from reality, like he’s sealed in a glass jar. Carol takes the lamp from him and moves it up to the wound in one smooth, quick gesture. At the exact moment when the light hits the wound, Tony looks away, unwilling to let himself see the inside of Steve’s chest, unwilling to know how deep the horrible tunnel goes. 

Steve’s arm, limp, is hanging off the table. Tony reaches for his hand and takes it in both of his own. It’s cold to the touch. His calloused palm is wider than Tony’s and his fingers are shorter, nails filed down short but dusty, dirty. Tony runs his fingers over the short, deep line at the top of his palm and his fingers twitch reflexively, ticklish. 

Somewhere miles away, Banner says, “It just missed the heart. It’s deep, though.” Treacherous tears prickle behind Tony’s eyes. It feels like Steve is already gone, like Steve should be here, now, reassuring them. His grip on the hand tightens, and this time, there’s no response. 

He must seem useless to them, hysterical, slow. 

No one knows. No one will ever know the depth of what he feels, now. Timely’s residents, as prone to gossip as they tend to be, would hardly consider Tony and Steve close friends. They had talked, sure, bantered. Tony had wandered down to the Sheriff’s building, drunkenly serenading the man inside. Steve had helped him out of trouble, had risked his own life to protect him. But so what? Small town. There had been, Tony reflects, a day when everyone had spoken freely to everyone. And he’d been a drunk, and a horrible singer, and hardly anyone had paid much attention to where he was going. And Steve— well, Steve had been the sheriff. There was no one in town he hadn’t helped, no one he wouldn’t have died for. 

Hell, perhaps he’d been sleeping with all of them, too. 

As bitter as the thought is, Tony doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe a man like Steve can touch a fella that way, can say the things he’d said, and not mean it. 

“Tony,” Carol says. Her warm hand lands heavily on his shoulder.

For a moment, Tony is paranoid that he’d been speaking out loud. “What?” 

“Alcohol,” She says slowly, as though she’s speaking to a child, “we were asking for alcohol to clean the wound.” 

Feeling like Steve deserves it, Tony fetches a bottle of the good stuff. Banner’s fingers emerge bloodied from the wound. Bits of congealed red matter are sticking to his fingernails. Steve was supposed to have been better than this, stronger than this. Steve was supposed to outlive him. 

Banner cleans the wound and wraps it without pulling the bullet out. Unbidden, Tony’s imagination draws forward the image of the bullet embedded in Steve’s body, jostled at every breath. Is he breathing? Is there any point to this? 

Banner wipes his fingers and presses them to Steve’s neck, feeling for his heartbeat. 

“He’s still alive. The bleeding’s mostly stopped,” he says, after a few tense seconds pass, “which is more than I expected. But I… I wouldn’t say this looks good, Stark. The next few days will tell.” 

“No,” Tony says, “it doesn’t look good.” 

Carol sighs, tapping her knuckles anxiously against Tony’s work table. As careful as she’d been to tie her dress up venturing into the pig pen, Steve’s blood had soaked through her clothes when she’d carried him. A deep spot of red now blooms on her own chest, mirroring the wound Steve had received. Tony is going to buy her a new shawl. 

“We have Fisk to think about,” she reminds them, “if there ain’t no funeral soon, he’ll come to bury the sheriff himself. Dead or alive.” 

“Let ‘em come,” he says darkly, glancing up at the metal shapes looming out of the darkness above them, “I’ll meet ‘em.”

“Stark,” Banner starts, “you—“ 

He doesn’t finish. Both of them know things are never going to be the same anymore. 

“You two go. I’ll get ready ta meet ‘em.” 

Carol glances at Banner. Banner glances at Carol. A moment of decision making seems to be passing between them, and her stronger will is winning out. Tony knows he hasn’t exactly been putting on a cool and confident front. 

When he speaks, his voice is quieter, but firm, “I build weapons. I can barricade myself in here with him and I can get ready. Just do one thing fer me?” 

“What?” 

“Tell ‘em the Sheriff is dead and I’m drinkin’ my old ass off in here, won’t ya?” 

“Yeah,” Bruce says, clearly seeing the sense of this plan, “yeah, a’right.” 

“What’m I ta do with him, Doc?” 

“Change the dressin’ on the wound,” Banner’s tone is far from optimistic, “if he wakes, whiskey in water. He runs a fever, ya try ta get me in here.” 

Tony nods. He’s got plenty of whiskey, at least. 

He offers Carol his arm, and she takes it. Tony opens the doors for them to go, closes every latch, and, with a great deal of effort, drags his heavy iron shelves to lean against them. 

Steve hasn’t stirred. 

“Just you and me again, partner?” Tony asks his pale face. 

He can’t remember the last time they had both been here. Steve doesn’t tend to — hadn’t tended to, perhaps— spend much time at Tony’s, had rarely been the one to initiate contact, to come seeking him out. It had been Tony coming down to the Sheriff’s office, had been Tony drunk and careening into Steve’s space, had been Tony hinting and winking and pushing, but— 

Hadn’t Steve given in? Hadn’t Steve kissed back, his rough, day-old stubble catching on Tony’s cheek, smelling of gunpowder and leather up close, of musky sweat? Hadn’t Steve looked at him like he’d cared, some kind of softness around his eyes, some kind of kindness? And on the drunken, messy, magnificent night that had started everything, hadn’t it been Steve who’d pushed his hand down Tony’s pants, Steve who’d grabbed handfuls of Tony’s hair, Steve who’d pressed him against the wall and— 

It must have been after one of their liaisons. It mustn’t have been very long ago, that they’d been here together. Tony must have been drunk — he was rarely sober in the evenings — and Steve, ever the gentlemen after their less gentlemanly acts, must have walked him home. 

He wouldn’t have come in. He never came in. 

He’s in now. 

Tony wonders if this is how Steve would choose to die, if he had the choice, if he’d want him there. He doesn’t have any family. Barnes had been a brother to him, and Barnes was long gone; would Steve have wanted to have his widow there in some imitation of the family unit? 

Is Tony the kind of man he’d like to die with? 

“You’d best wake up, Sheriff,” Tony says, “yer’re feeding my inadequacy complex once more.” 

He wants a drink, and badly, but he knows exactly where that road leads. If Steve survives this (Steve won’t survive this, he tells himself, as scared of hope as he is of loss) it’ll all be for nothing if Fisk’s men come to bury him alive. 

He smashes the bottles one by one, leaving the glass scattered by the shelves blocking the door, letting the scent of alcohol hang heavy in the air. The pieces of glass and puddles will serve as possible deterrents. Mindful of Banner’s instructions, he leaves the whiskey. 

And then he gets to work. 

He knows the symptoms of withdrawal well enough, though realistically it hasn’t been long enough for him to start feeling them, but the act of destroying the bottles seems to push him over the edge. His heart rackets up almost as soon as he fires up the forge and pulls out his sledgehammer, his too-loose, too-soft body protesting the exertion. It’s been a long time since he’s done this. 

Warmth fills the room, and the head-splitting headache follows it shortly after. Steve lays, pale, on the table, and doesn’t move. Too scared to check his pulse again, too scared to find out one way or another, Tony reaches for scrap metal.

His hands shake as takes his own measurements, shake badly enough that it takes him minutes to read the numbers in the dim light. He hammers, hard, at the half-formed chest plate, and feels each blow in the tension lines of his jaw, his temples, behind his eyes. 

He braces himself against the counter and squeezes his eyes shut, but the only two images that await him are the broken bottles on the floor and Steve’s pale, lifeless face, and that alone pushes him back towards the forge, towards the iron chest plate, the sledgehammer, the overwhelming heat. 

He sweats what feels like buckets. Hours in, despite the hot metal around him, he pulls off his shirt and vest. Behind him, he hears a drawn out noise, raspy and wet, something between a breath and nails dragging on brick. 

His heart skips a bit, and then pounds wildly against his ear drums. 

Steve’s head is turned towards him, his eyes open. He has to have moved. He doesn’t look like he’s sleeping, anymore. He doesn’t look peaceful. He doesn’t look alive. 

The room is all too hot, but Tony’s entire body feels even hotter, like he’s been cooked, like hot meat is about to burst from under his skin. His right hand is hot and wet. His heart pulses hard in his temples, and his chest, and his right hand. He’s torn the skin on his palm open on the handle of the sledgehammer. 

When he finally reaches out to lay a hand on Steve’s neck, he stains it with his own blood, red on white. The sheriff is cold to the touch, and Tony wishes he could somehow even them out, bring them to the middle ground between these extremes of hot and cold. He feels his own frantic heartbeat in his fingers, drowning out the one Steve may or may not have. 

Steve’s eyes are closed. He looks peaceful. He could be sleeping. Why had Tony thought he couldn’t be? 

Tony can’t help but speak to him. “Are y’alive, Steve? You’re alive, Steve.” 

Somehow, he’s not surprised to hear Steve’s voice from somewhere to his left, not surprised that Steve’s lips don’t move when he speaks. 

“Is there a point to being alive when the dream is dead?” Steve asks him, as calm as anything, like they’re sitting out on the grass with lemonades, debating politics. They’ve never sat out on the grass with lemonades. They’ve never debated politics. Tony wishes desperately they had, that he’d have a real idea of what Steve would sound like, then, instead of the strange caricature his brain is filling in. 

“Ghost,” says Steve, “ghost, not caricature.” 

Tony turns to check if he can see if, but no ghost shows itself. It’s only the voice. 

“None of you stood with me,” Steve accuses, “you left me alone. You’re the reason—“ 

“I was drunk,” Tony says, “I woulda been useless.” 

“You’re drunk every night, Tony. You woulda been useless every night. And that ain’t no kind of support.” 

“I can be different,” Tony says, without believing it. 

“Too late for that, ain’t it?” 

Steve’s hair clings to his forehead in messy, wet chunks. Momentarily forgetting his bloodied hand, Tony reaches up and pushes it out of his face. A drop of red makes a perfect circle between his eyes, breaks, dribbling down his nose and onto his closed eyelid. It could be, now, that his eyelashes flutter. 

“I’m going to make things right,” Tony tells the room, and picks up the sledge hammer. 

He realizes quickly enough why he hadn’t seen the ghost in the room; it dances in the flames of the forge. Occasionally, he sees Steve’s face, angled up towards him, in the fire. Other times, it’s the set of his shoulders, the sway of his gait, the motion of his hands on his pistol. 

Steve’s younger than him, but Tony isn’t sure by how much. Five years, it could be. Three. Eight. They hadn’t talked about things like birthdays, hadn’t talked about their families and their pasts, but, last year, four days shy of Tony’s thirty-second, Steve had said, in passing, “maybe once I’m thirty,” and, Tony had thought, perhaps unfairly,  _ You’re still a kid, Rogers. _

He’d thought of Steve as “Rogers,” last year. He doesn’t know what changed. He knows what changed. 

Steve stares at him out of the fire. Tony wonders if he’ll remember the color of his eyes five years from now. 

They hadn’t talked about families, but, once, on the rare occasion that Tony had ended up in Steve’s bed, something had taken them down a rabbit hole. 

“Now don’tcha have a ma or an auntie, Rogers?” Then, Tony had already been thinking of Steve as Steve, but he’d never gotten around to saying it. “Someone botherin’ ya to find yerself a nice lass n’ settle down?” 

Steve had shaken his head, blond bangs halfway in front of his eyes, and said, “Since Bucky’s gone, his ma ain’t been wanting me ‘round those parts anymore, n’ I can’t say I don’t get it.” 

He talked like it was that simple, like Bucky’s family had been the only one Tony could possibly had meant. Tony hadn’t pressed further. They’d had so little time until dawn, and it was entirely too easy to pretend to be drunker than he was, to let his head fall comfortably against Steve’s naked chest. When he was drunk like that, Steve would let him stay, would fuss a little, sometimes, like they were something different than what they’d been. 

By the end of it, he was sure both of them had known he was pretending. 

His hand is slippery on the hot tongs he uses to shape the faceplate. Blood drips onto the red-hot metal and evaporates instantly. The first rays of the morning’s sunlight fall through the windows. The shape of a man, clunky and rounded, metallic, lays in front of Tony. 

He was always sober enough to leave when the dawn came, but drunk enough to let thoughts slide unbidden into his mind, to imagine Steve asking him to stay, imagine Steve’s fingers around his wrist, Steve’s lips on his ear. 

In five years, he’ll forget the curve of Steve’s lips. 

He’s horribly nauseous. The room is still over hot. The smell of his spilled, smashed alcohol, now mostly evaporated, hangs so heavily in the air that Tony wonders if there’s any oxygen left to breathe. It’s soaked into the furniture, into the walls, into his clothes. Into Steve’s clothes. 

Hammer hits metal, splitting Tony’s temples one last time, and then, painstakingly, he begins working himself into the suit. Some of the metal is still hot to the touch, not hot enough to burn but hot enough to hurt, and the rest is just warm, suffocating. 

Metal hits metal. Fisk’s men are here, at the crack of dawn, to collect the Sheriff’s body. The metal door warps. The heavy iron shelves rattle. The steady clanging of their battering ram against the door reminds Tony of a beating heart. Early morning light, pinkish orange, hits Steve’s half-open eyes, making them look darker and deeper than before. 

“It’s too late,” says Steve’s ghost, in the room.

“Let me at them,” says Steve’s ghost, in the fire. 

His hands covered in metal, Tony can’t reach over and check for a pulse, can’t try to feel for breath over Steve’s lips in the trembling, heavy air. But hadn’t his eyes moved? 

The metal clatter down to the ground. Tony could stop them, but instead he lets them knock over the still-burning forge. Flames dance on his alcohol-soaked rug. 

Tony’s going to leave through the back door. As he pulls the body off the table and into his arms, he thinks it may yet be alive; Steve’s fingers curl lightly against his metal covered chest. 

But the sheriff’s ghost rises out of the fire, broad-shouldered and angry, vengeful, and Tony flees. 

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks to my beta! i will reveal her name after the exchange is over. :>
> 
> detailed tws: hallucinations, heavy references to alcohol, references to (consensual) sex while inebriated, depictions of animals (pigs) being shot and animal bodies mentioned in the story. 
> 
> i hope you liked it!!


End file.
